‘I seem to have used art as the artifacts of identity’

There’s a dream-like neck of the urban Indian woods, called Lutyen’s Delhi. Those who have lived in it are touched forever by its cocooning green magic. The avenues of splendid old neem and jamun. The misty October air. The gardens, bright with annuals, the Bengali Sweet House in Khan Market, old Rajaram Chemist and Saluja Dairy. The kindly trees and tombs of Lodi Gardens that sheltered teenage romances. The stretch of pavement outside Ambassador Hotel, where the children of New Delhi -3 gathered, to board the Special to Delhi University. Swotting in the India International Centre Library for exams. A swim and chicken sandwiches at the Gymkhana Club. Self-conscious dancing, ferocious book learning, Mozart and mazurkas, lemon tarts and lace.

A self-assured world of East-Westism, where the veena was learned with as much rigour as the piano. Where Siddheshwari Devi lived and sang thumris across the walls from personal libraries gathered by three generations of Oxonians. This world was casteless, wildly eclectic and the air was very pure and free to breathe. No money, but privilege. We were being trained to rule India. As soon as we found our feet, we would be strong enough to use our power to do good. But our world died in the ’70s. And suddenly, everyone called us names...

This tremulous world of the Brown Sahib, its inheritors and challengers, is the burden of Sagarika Ghose’s song in her debut novel The Gin Drinkers. But it’s her sustained use of wall art to sketch identity that intrigues RENUKA NARAYANAN the most.

Sagarika, let’s be upfront with this, before some disgruntled person says, “Did you know...” I’ve known you for years! I find The Gin Drinkers wonderfully nostalgic and at times almost too painfully close to the bone. Shared sarkari childhoods do that, ask anyone! But what grabbed my eye was the way wall art is used in your novel as an identity marker.

The Gin Drinkers are a much maligned lot. The old left-leaning English-speaking elite which modelled itself on Nehru and gang and ignored their own traditions. Hang them! Kill them! They’re the reason why our culture has decayed. But were they so evil? Or did they in fact seek to create a synthesis of Modigliani and Kalighat paintings? Of Jamini Roy and Monet? They were what their paintings showed. The brown sahibs would cringe at The Bold and Beautiful. They would squirm at ‘dumbed down’ shock art. Instead, they would hang lithographs of old Lahore on their walls, Buddhist tankhas and the early Anjolie Ela Menon. That’s because they had eclectic tastes and were brought up to have a love affair with India. They saved their salaries for art but prints were the only things they could afford. They were mostly all salaried. And so they drove their Premier Padminis to Husain exhibitions and came back with their hearts thumping about their own new identities, that they would then display.

You’ve hung Ravi Varmas, Calcutta lithos, French prints on the walls of your bhadralok while multi-faith emblems and Hindu calendar art guard their children’s sleep. But how come the Dalit settings in your novel have only Ambedkar statues?
That’s because the Gin Drinkers weren’t able to bring in the rest of India into their cultural ambit. Without stronger links to the rest of India, their culture remained narrow and did not grow. As the poem in the book says: The Brahmin sees the beauty of flowers, water and lakes. But an Untouchable’s eye sees only the fish under the lake so that he could catch and eat. The sahibs did not allow the Dalits to grow into cultural vitality, and thus the thin vulnerable line of culture just died out without infusion of new dynamism.

The theft of rare books from the brown sahibs’ personal libraries says that the ‘Others’ covet this — cultural literacy — more than material privilege.
Crass culture-less India is in fact the great Indian (upper) middle class. They leer, they burp, they send their kids to air-conditioned schools. The sahibs would never patronise flashy cars. Instead, they would buy objets d’art and maybe pay for music lessons. The new middle class has no time for knowledge or intellectual striving. But there are those who crave mental excitement. There are those who want literary know-how. There are those who want to grow into education because mere materialism, although very important, will just keep them enslaved. They can be rich, earn a lot of money, but the discrimination will remain. I can’t tell you more, else the story will be told!

Are you essentially saying that no amount of money or neo-privilege will buy lineage and all that is encoded with it? That only honest study will fill the blanks?
Yes, and one character says exactly that. When you’ve been barred for generations, then you have a cataclysmically different worldview. Yet there lies anger and fire. There lies intellectual power. There lies muscular thought. And that allied with the traditional knowledge of the brown sahib is the winning combination for India. It’s the smug middle class in the middle that’s the cultural lumpen in our country.

So, is the art on the walls of the brown sahibs a pugmark of failed sensibility?
Exactly. Alas, they remained colonised. They hung out in the same colonial verandahs, drinking gin. Gin was liquid colonisation! And so their India was an unjust one, in which they monopolised privileges. They failed to create intellectual robustness. They failed to create a humane state. They failed to redefine themselves according to their surroundings. If they had, they might have survived.

They would have been able to create an intelligentsia that was truly syncretic. They might have been able to create lasting intellectual traditions. To be sure, they bought their MOMA prints and their Subramaniam goats, but they didn’t translate their own fusion into a sense of public service. I seem to have used art instinctively as the artifacts of identity, as the markers of who these people were. I feel that’s a peculiar trait of the intelligentsia — they do up their walls not just with things that look nice, but with things which reflect their eclectic minds, as opposed to those who buy these things as status symbols.

Back | Next